Friday 17 May 2013 13.44 EDT
First published on Friday 17 May 2013 13.44 EDT

For Ocado, the deal with Morrisons stacks up beautifully on day one. When the online specialist opened its second huge distribution centre in Dordon, Warwickshire, in February the worry was that it would take ages to fill a warehouse capable of handling £1bn of sales a year. Now there's a quickish solution: half the space will be devoted to Morrisons' new online business.

The financial terms for Ocado also look smart. By selling Dordon to Morrisons for £170m and leasing it back, Ocado will be transformed from a company with net debt to one with a handsome cash balance. It will also get a string of other payments from IT licence fees to a quarter-share of any operating profits from Morrisons.com for the next 15 years. Neat.

Morrisons was clearly desperate to deal. For a decade, the Bradford-based firm has sat smugly outside an online party where no supermarket seems to be making a hard bottom-line profit at £5 delivery charges. Chief executive Dalton Philips has finally had to concede that he is losing customers and that there is a risk in not dancing.

Everybody happy? Mark Price, boss of Waitrose, is not. He has summoned a QC and wants to see the small print. Fair enough, since Ocado is a business built on its sourcing agreement with Waitrose and the relationship is supposed to be mutually beneficial. But was it also meant to be monogamous? That's the issue. The Ocado folk are no mugs. It would be astonishing if there has been a breach of contract.

Instead, a breakdown in the long-term relationship between Waitrose and Ocado is the way to bet. In one sense, that would be a continuation of the established story. The John Lewis Partnership's pension fund sold its entire shareholding soon after Ocado's flotation in 2010. Waitrose has been free to compete with Ocado since 2011 – and is doing so.

The best policy for Price, if he remains peeved, is to redouble his efforts to recruit Ocado customers to Waitrose ways. If he succeeds, he'll have a stronger hand to exercise the break clause with Ocado in 2017. If that happens, Ocado and Morrisons would be pushed into a closer embrace. The fact that their agreement runs for 25 years suggests they're already planning that way.

Dear government, your new proposed high-speed railway is an economic turkey. Every time the numbers are updated or corrected, the cost/benefit advantage becomes smaller. Some of the data in your model is 10 years out of date. And the claim that the north-south divide would be closed is unproven.

Of course, the National Audit Office didn't actually call HS2 a turkey. It prefers phrases like "the strategic case should be better developed at this stage". But, if a company were proposing a project with the economic characteristics of HS2, the shareholders would be in uproar. They would demand the immediate scrapping of the plans and a new board of directors.

Alarm bells sound when you see how far the Department for Transport's claimed benefits of the project have shrunk. Back in 2010, the numbers suggested £2.60 of benefits for every £1 spent to build phase one, the line between London and Birmingham. Now we're down to £1.40 and this figure relies heavily on the calculation that the gain from carrying business travellers at faster speeds is £12.6bn.

The figure is questionable, to put it mildly. "The department's methodology uses a simplifying assumption that time spent travelling is unproductive," says the NAO. In other words, the assumption is that business folk do not work on trains. In the age of the internet and 4G telephony, that's nonsense.

The NAO report is merely an analysis of the programme as presented. The main objection to HS2 is simpler: there are more productive ways to spend £35bn on transport. Almost every study, from the Eddington report of 2006 onwards, says so. How about ensuring the M62 doesn't become a daily traffic jam? That would be a surer way to boost growth in the north than building a faster railway to the capital. There are other smaller ideas, both road and rail, that could be adopted.

HS2 is a luxury, dreamed up in an era of imagined plenty. It should be scrapped and the £35bn spent on transport projects with superior economics.

Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou ought to be delighted. The founder of easyJet has achieved a lot in his five years of agitation from the outside. He's got a brand licensing deal worth about £10m a year to his easyGroup. After campaigning for easyJet to pay a dividend, the prize appeared in 2011. It amounts to about £40m a year to him, his brother and his sister, who own 37% of easyJet between them. He has also seen Mike Rake, his bete noire, depart as chairman this month. Best of all, easyJet's share price has trebled since the start of 2012. The Haji-Ioannou family's stake is now worth a cool £1.75bn.

Is he happy? Only up to a point. "Good things happen to airlines that do not order more aircraft," he said this week as easyJet unveiled its latest strong numbers, which, as he says, owe much to the airline's ability to charge higher ticket prices in an industry that isn't adding capacity. Then came the inevitable warning to the board: "All this good work could be undone by the vanity exercise of buying new aircraft."

A showdown seems likely. Chief executive Carolyn McCall (formerly of this parish: she was chief executive of Guardian Media Group) appears to be warming up her shareholders for a sizeable order. The City expects 100 aircraft, with the bulk to be used to replace existing planes in the 210-strong fleet.

Sir Stelios would be furious. But what would he do? Remember what he said in January when he and his siblings each sold a "token" (his word) 200,000 shares to send a clear message to the directors: "If they place such an order now I will be looking to dispose of more of my stake before this happens."

If he was serious about selling before the supposedly dreadful day, make-your-mind-up time is close. McCall has said the board is in the final stages of evaluating the new aircraft question.

In Sir Stelios' shoes, you might also be staring at that share price and wondering whether there'll ever be a better opportunity to diversify the family's investment portfolio. The stock market is in bullish mood and easyJet is riding high. If he wanted to slip, say, a quarter of his stake on to the market, the moment is ripe. On his way out, he could legitimately declare his unique style of activism to be a triumph. It's a hunch. We shall see.

Image: Guardian Graphics

Harriet Green reminded us this week that she has been chief executive of Thomas Cook for 41 weeks and that the firm's "decisive and rapid" action is "already delivering results." That's unarguable. Thomas Cook is not just back from the brink – it's in the game again. A cost-cutting plan is proceeding at full speed, a successful £1.6bn refinancing was unveiled on Thursday and the share price has recovered from 16p to 158p.

Green stands to make a fortune. Her package on arrival from distrbutor Premier Farnell comprised 6.2m shares. These are now worth almost £10m – call it £250,000 a week for her 41 weeks so far. She still has to clear the three-year performance hurdles, but that now looks a formality. Is she worth it? If the yardstick is the £15m received by former boss Manny Fontenla-Novoa during five years that ended in a share price calamity, the answer is yes.